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Report of North Koreans' Claim on Nuclear Rods Appears in South
By DON KIRK
EOUL, July 13 — North Korea claims to have reprocessed all its spent nuclear fuel rods while restarting a small experimental reactor and working on two much bigger reactors, a South Korean report said today.
Chang Sung Min, a former member of South Korea's national assembly, said that a high-level United States official had quoted North Korean diplomats as saying the North had finished reprocessing its 8,000 spent fuel rods by the end of last month, according to Yonhap, the semi-official South Korean news agency.
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Mr. Chang said North Korea's two top representatives at the United Nations made the claim on July 8 in a meeting in New York with Jack Pritchard, the American envoy assigned exclusively to the North Korean issue, and David Straub, director of the Korean desk at the State Department, Yonhap reported.
Mr. Chang, a member of South Korea's ruling Millennium Democratic Party, with close ties to Kim Dae Jung, the former South Korean president who initiated the South's policy of reconciliation with North Korea, reportedly was briefed in Washington.
In the conversation, according to Yonhap, the North Koreans said that scientists and engineers at the Yongbyon complex 50 miles north of Pyongyang had restarted a five-megawatt experimental reactor from which it is possible to extract the plutonium for nuclear warheads. At the same time, the report said, the North said it had resumed work on two large reactors, one with a capacity of 200 megawatts, the other just 50 megawatts.
All work at the Yongbyon complex was frozen under terms of the 1994 Geneva framework agreement, which fell apart last fall after the North acknowledged the existence of an entirely separate program for developing nuclear warheads from enriched uranium.
South Korean officials declined to comment today on the report or on another report, carried by Japan's Kyodo news agency, that said American analysts had taken air samples over the Yongbyon complex that showed a substance known as krypton 85, a byproduct of reprocessing.
Although the report of krypton 85 indicated the North Koreans were indeed working on the spent fuel rods, analysts and officials have been highly uncertain as to whether their claims of going ahead with reprocessing were true or part of the negotiating process — or both.
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said on the NBC News program "Meet the Press" that the North Koreans "told us they have nuclear weapons" and had "made assertions to the pace at which they're reprocessing" but acknowledged the doubts. "Some people believe what they are saying," he said. "Other people don't believe what they are saying."
North Korea has demanded bilateral talks with the United States on halting its program while spurning multilateral talks that would include South Korea, Japan, China and possibly Russia at the table.
North Korean negotiators steadfastly refused last weekend to agree on a place for South Korea in talks on nuclear weapons but left open the possibility of a face-saving way out of the impasse.
Hopes for the multilateral talks were raised just slightly after an overnight debate between North and South Korean cabinet members that resulted Saturday in a six-point communiqué that began with the two sides agreeing "to resolve the nuclear issue peacefully through appropriate dialogue." The two sides, the communiqué added, would work together for "peace and security on the Korean peninsula."
Official South Korean spinmasters promptly saw the bright side of what some reports called the failure of the negotiators to come to terms on the multilateral talks to which North Korea has said it will never consent. The North Korean position is that it will negotiate only with the United States on its nuclear weapons program.
Shin Eon Sang, spokesman for the South's delegation, told South Korean reporters it "would not be correct" to say the agreement to engage in "appropriate dialogue" was the fruit of the South's "unending persuasion" to get the North to agree on multilateral talks. The inference was the North Koreans saw the necessity for multilateral talks even if were not authorized to include the term in the agreement.
The agreement seemed to indicate the North's desire for improving relations with the South despite the nuclear issue.
Negotiators agreed on another round of reunions of families separated by the Korean War at the Mount Kumkang resort in North Korea during the Korean thanksgiving holidays in September and on more talks on North-South economic cooperation in late August.
The agreement, however, also included provisions that were sure to arouse controversy here, including formation of a committee on social and cultural exchanges and cooperation on joint ceremonies on Aug. 15, the date of the Japanese surrender in 1945 that ended 35 years of Japanese rule over the Korean peninsula.
Conservatives have charged that North Korea turned previous joint ceremonies into forums for propaganda that appealed to South Korean leftists opposed to the United States military alliance with South Korea. |
